HAPPY F#@KING BIRTHDAY, TROIE!

Troie is this crazy dude who I see about once a week in the gym, because he generally comes in at the 615am WOD on weekdays.  He likes to parade around shirtless and be-Vibramed, and it's very, very rare to see him when he's not either totally beasting a WOD or air drumming (sometimes both at once).  My nickname for his is Little Jacked Drummer Boy, or Clark Kent when he's in his work clothes.  And he's now 27!  So we did the following:

4 rounds for time of

• 27 jumping air squats
• 27 plyometric push-ups
• 27 bodyweight (hah) deadlifts
• 27 ab mat sit-ups
• 27-second hold at the top of a pull-up

 I freaking ROCK at jumping air squats.  It seems like they go by a lot faster than regular squats.  I don't know if that's actually the case, but I just like jumping, so that makes it awesome.

So, plyometric push-ups, right?  They're rather akin to the jumping air squats, in that you go through the regular movement, but instead of letting gravity stop you at the top of the move, you just ignore that bitch and keep going.  So, regular push-up, but you push up extra hard and leave the ground slightly at the top.  When I saw this move on the board, I kind of chuckled to myself and then waved Coach Ryan (who doesn't have a nickname yet) over to discuss scaling.  He said I could either go to my knees or do them off of an elevated surface, so I planned on the knees.  And then the WOD started and I got to them...and...I didn't need to scale.  I can do plyo push-ups, and not just a couple at a time, either!  (I eventually went to my knees for 5 at a time in-between regular ones later, but only when I was close to failure).  So yeah.  I am a rockstar.

DLs ended up being 135lbs for the first round and 95 for the rest.  I could have gone higher than 95 but that's a hell of a lot of  reps, and I'm already slow.  And I went up to 200lbs for 4 reps the other day.  Still a rockstar.

The pull-up holds were meh...they're really, really hard, and apparently I ripped my hands up, so that kind of hurt.  I subbed as close as I could get to the same position on the rings, using a false grip with my feet on the ground, after the first or second round.

Truth be told, I only did 3 rounds of this.  I am currently experiencing hormone poisoning, which helps with the rage and adrenaline, but also makes me all woozy if I go too hard.  I got really dizzy partway through the third round, so decided to call it after that.  Still took me 31:34.  So...not too much a rockstar, after all.  I want to try this one again when I'm not indisposed.

And then we did mobility!  I hadn't seen Coach Too-Cute-To-Hate in seriously a month, so it was awesome to see him, even though he laughed at me pretty much as soon as he saw me.  It's ok, though.  I told him the really funny thing was that my hair was shorter than his and his voice was higher than mine.

On a last note, we were all stretching by one of the walls and Dave decided to saunter on over and touch up a patch low on the wall right beside ME - nowhere else that wasn't 8 feet in the air! - so that I put my hand right in the wet paint.  Next time I will high-five your FACE, Dave.

-Nelly